She can feel Louis watching them all.
Baldwin, of course, gets the house. As the last surviving member of his generation, and Loulou’s sole heir, this is expected. Nell’s mother, who has been dead a decade now, is not mentioned. Nor is her father, which is understood. Loulou claimed he was never a true Quincy, and, as an in-law, he wasn’t. Nell had called him in Italy, and he had refused to come. “Come see me afterward,” he’d said. “You’ll need it.”
“?‘And the residue of my estate,’?” Pansy reads out loud. “?‘Keeping in mind the provisions I have made for my son, Baldwin, and his children in subsequent bequests and gifts, both in this instrument and throughout their lifetimes, blah-blah-blah to be divided and blah-blah by my grandchildren and my grandniece Cornelia Quincy Merrihew.’ Translation?” she says, looking at Louis.
“You split the contents of the house in thirds, notwithstanding the enumerated gifts, of course. The structure itself goes to Baldwin.”
Louis passes around another stack of papers without meeting Baldwin’s eye. “The trusts, and the money therein, remain much as they were when they were established during her lifetime. You’ll see little change there.”
Louis turns to Baldwin. “And you remain executor of those.”
Emerson is scanning his copy, mumbling to himself.
“There’s a bit of money left,” Louis says, nodding toward a stack of paper in Emerson’s hands. “That’s the most recent trust statement from the financial advisors that you asked for.”
“It was intended for her to live on,” Baldwin says, a touch defensively, as Emerson flips to the last pages containing the totals.
“She went through it like spaghetti,” Emerson says under his breath.
“Son,” Baldwin says with a shake of his head.
Pansy turns to her father. “Did you know about this, too?” She rises, unfolding herself in the lanky, double-jointed way of an athlete. “About the contents?”
Baldwin only shrugs at Pansy and then turns to address Nell, though she’s not asked any of the millions of questions whirring through her mind. “If you must know, she asked me if I wanted it all. And I couldn’t lie to her. I don’t. I have everything I need, and I don’t need a bunch of Mother’s old things.” At Pansy’s look, he says, “What? I thought she should do what she wanted with it. I have to say, I never thought she’d gift it to all of you equally.” He turns to Louis and says, “But that was silly of me—”
“As it stands, I know she took a long time considering her options,” Louis interrupts, ready to move this along.
“She always did feel guilty about your mother,” Baldwin continues to Nell in the magnanimous tone of someone secure that he’s gotten everything he wanted.
Nell’s neck feels hot, and she decides to opt for the nicotine gum, even though she’d really like a cigarette, an old habit she’s been able to fend off in times of stress with the gum. What she’d really like is a few moments to step outside and breathe. Even breathing in noxious poison would be better than sitting in this atmosphere.
“She had one of the nurses call very late on a Saturday night,” Louis is saying to Emerson in response to some question about the date of the will. “If you look you’ll see we had the nurse on staff as a witness. I couldn’t come until Monday morning, so she’d even had a few days to think about it, and she was quite clear.” Here he looks Pansy in the eye. “And she was quite lucid when she requested the changes. For good measure, because I knew—” Here he clears his throat. “Because I knew she’d want it done properly, you’ll see the affidavit at the end, signed by two doctors, stating that she was in sufficient health, not in pain, and not suffering under any mental deficiency when she requested these changes.”
“One of them’s Dr. Kelly, her old bridge partner,” Emerson says, looking up from the page. “He’s almost as old as she is.”
“I think you’ll find Dr. Kelly is still a practicing member of the AMA. And the other affidavit is from his younger partner in the practice, Dr. Chin.”
Louis is then met with a barrage of questions; no one waits for him to answer before firing another. What does this mean for taxes? Who’s to take care of the day-to-day? How does this affect the generation-skipping trusts? What do we do next?
All the questions secretly ask the same thing: do you know what you’re doing?
Nell watches as the chummy rapport with Louis fades away, suspicion falling into place quickly. She reaches into her bag for another piece of gum and adds it to the wad in her cheek, feeling the nicotine hit her bloodstream.
“Can I have one of those?” Pansy asks.
“It’s nicotine gum.” Nell mumbles her confession.
“Okay,” Pansy says. “I’d like one.”
“Seriously?”
“I’m open to all experiences.”
At that, Nell hands it over. She never has been able to say no to Pansy. No one has.
Pansy raises it in toast before popping it in. “Sorry to hear about you and Paul breaking up,” she says as she chews. Meanwhile, Baldwin and Emerson drill Louis on provisions she doesn’t care about.
Nell has to think for a minute about how to respond to a kindness from Pansy. Things have been over with Paul for months, but Nell recognizes the gesture. And there are other factors to consider. There’s Pansy’s smugness, backed by her seemingly successful marriage to Brian, a management consultant who travels constantly. There are their two boys, who are enmeshed in soccer and lacrosse. And then there is her job as a holistic life coach and intuitive guide, which seems to be doing well given the elite pricing Nell had seen when she’d stalked the website yesterday.
This is all in contrast to what Nell suspects is the Quincy view of her life, as ingrained as it is retro: a spinster with no kids, a sucking black hole of a career, and a wastrel father in Italy.
“But I never liked him. No one did.” And this is classic Pansy, thinks Nell, nodding her head at the predictability, but looking like she agrees. Pansy’s digs are not traditionally the type of thing you can call her out on without looking crazy or defending an untenable position. Paranoia hits Nell in the chest at the thought of a Quincy cabal discussing the wretchedness of Paul, of her life, only now letting their opinions be known. It’s one thing to suspect, quite another to confirm.
The shimmering glamour-spell of the Quincys is fading, as it does when she’s around them long enough, reminding her that her mother did know best and a wide berth is required. She cracks her gum in response to Pansy.